Fury Director David Ayer: Shia LaBeouf Is Screwing with You

He talks about the actor's "all-in" performance, and Brad Pitt's sparring sessions

"Ideals are peaceful, history is violent," says Brad Pitt as griddled Sherman tank commander Don "Wardaddy" Collier to his newest crewmember Norman (Logan Lerman) in the World War II drama Fury, out today. The violent in that line pretty much sums up the tone of this unforgiving film, but also the MO of its hard-edged director, David Ayer.

A high-school dropout who grew up in South Central, LA, then in the '80s ended up being a sonar operator on a submarine, Ayer has experienced things most filmmakers only dream up, and he's used his unusual life to make an imprint on Hollywood. In 2001, he wrote Training Day and turned Denzel Washington into a despicable corrupt cop (garnering him a Best Actor Oscar). After penning a few more cop movies, he moved to directing and found critical acclaim in 2012's End of Watch. Now years of research and stories from his family of veterans has led him to take on "The Good War." In Fury, Ayer gives us a warts-and-all look inside the lives of Wardaddy and his crew (Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal) as their scrappy tank division battles the well-armed Nazi forces in Germany. A mix of Saving Private Ryan and The Wild Bunch, Fury is a beautifully crafted man's-man movie that proves Ayer can do more than just cop dramas.

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When we met Ayer at the Sony offices in New York City earlier this week, he was mum on rumors of him taking on DC Comics' Suicide Squad movie (which days later was confirmed), but he was very open about a lot of other topics. Like why he believes Shia LaBeouf's headline-grabbing antics onset were all an act, the reasons Brad Pitt needed to take the Wardaddy role, and the best way to connect with someone (through a fistfight).

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ESQUIRE.COM: For years you've been trying to get away from cop movies. Do you consider this a step up in your career?

DAVID AYER: It's an expansion, but it's also world creation because every asset onscreen has to be built, sourced, painted, so it's really my first foray into a total world creation. It's really exciting. It's the prettiest movie I've done.

ESQ: You wrote the script in two weeks. Why so quickly?

DA: I shot Sabotage [2013 cop movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger], and I took two weeks off while the editor was doing the first assembly. I'd been wanting to do a World War II movie, I'd been researching it, my grandparents were in the war, so it was something that I had been exploring, so I wrote it in that time.

ESQ: So this wasn't an answer to the bad reviews of Sabotage—

DA: Oh, God no. Sabotage was an opportunity. That was journeyman work, but the irony is I learned more off that movie on what filmmaking is and isn't than everything else combined. A lot of lessons and it will impact me for the rest of my career. With Fury, I just felt like so many movies didn't capture what that war was really like. Often World War II movies are black-and-white because the war itself was morally clear. It's a fight between good and evil. But down at the actual scrimmage line, between good and evil, it was two drunks at a bar just slugging it out.

ESQ: As you know from being one, vets don't like to bring up the horrors they did or witnessed during war. Yet in all of your work, you strive to bring that out.

DA: I'm fascinated by the people who are franchised by society to use force on our behalf. I'm a big believer in the idea that we get to sleep in our beds and be safe and sound because there are guys out there doing really fucked-up shit in our name. But where is that psychic bill paid? That's what I like to explore because even the most sociopathic dudes I know, they got a lot of hurt in their heart over the things they've seen and done, and that's fascinating to me.

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ESQ: Is making these movies your release? Is this therapeutic for you?

DA: I think so. My father died when I was really young, on Christmas Day. And this idea of a surrogate father, the mentorship, is something that rings through my work.

ESQ: How old were you when he passed?

DA: Four. It's interesting because I think a lot of times you're trying to fix the broken mission or fix the broken past with filmmaking.

ESQ: Do you think Brad Pitt was trying to fix something in signing on for this? Wardaddy is not the stereotypical leader. He shoots kids who are Nazis, forces his newest crewmember to shoot an unarmed Nazi in the back.

DA: Now that I know him, it makes a lot of sense to me. He was chasing an immersive experience, an all-in experience as an actor, and I think he's chasing some kind of honesty or truth. He's from the Midwest so I think he has that stoicism in him and sense of duty. I think there were things in that character that resonated with him personally. Brad did extensive work in trying to understand the behavior and attitude and just what's the skin of this character to inhabit and he plays the paradox of "I love these guys yet I have to ask them to do things that risk their lives."

ESQ: It seems Shia LaBeouf, at leastrecently, is starting to turn things around personally after some bizarre behavior. Were you concerned for him at all during shooting?

I saw a lot of what Shia LaBeouf was doing as just trying to shed that skin and literally burn himself in effigy in public so that he can walk out of the ashes and be reborn as this brilliant, freaking capable adult actor. He was all in.

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DA: I think with Shia it's interesting. The rumors are all fun, but at the end of the day you have a guy who's a child actor and is seen and known for a body of work but happens to be the real deal. Who happens to be a freaking brilliant actor. I saw a lot of what he was doing as just trying to shed that skin and literally burn himself in effigy in public so that he can walk out of the ashes and be reborn as this brilliant, freaking capable adult actor. He was all in. He went and embedded himself with the National Guard unit, he started prep before anybody. He shadowed a military chaplin, learned how to minister to troops, scripture, he really went in deep in these incredible ways.

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ESQ: Did you check in from time to time?

DA: Oh, I tracked him. [Laughs] I tracked the hell out of him. But I loved working with him. He was zero problems for me and all the public stuff that he didn't take a shower or he pulled a tooth or he came to set in a UFO—people can't separate the public and the private. He's on my set working his ass off and then he'd go and put something on Twitter.

ESQ: So what you're saying is all that was an act to mess with people?

DA: He's manipulating people. It's like performance art. It's very conscious on his part. But from a PR standpoint, from the way you're supposed to be in the business, yeah, you're not supposed to do that. But he's got the freaking talent to back his play so it's fine.

ESQ: You make films that are about tough people and you cast badass actors with insane egos. How do you get these guys to understand that you're the top dog?

DA: I grew up in the ghetto. [Laughs] I'm not a film-school guy. I was a high-school dropout. I was on a nuclear submarine. I was an electrician. I was a house painter. So if you get in my face, I'm going to fight you. Maybe I won't win, maybe I will, but we'll learn something, won't we?

ESQ: Speaking of that, according to what Jon Bernthal told Jimmy Kimmel, you had fight sessions every morning during production.

DA: [Sighs] Yeah. I mean actors are insanely competitive and they hold back on each other. They are like magicians and none of them want to show their tricks, so they are always working through these layers as they get to know each other. To bypass that is to just have them fight. You want to learn something about somebody, get into a fistfight. You'll learn more in five minutes than you will in five weeks of conversations. It's basic.

ESQ: Was this a daily routine?

They would spar every day. Brad would spar.

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DA: Yeah. They would spar every day. Brad would spar.

ESQ: But this is Hollywood. There had to be some decorum, like no shots to the face. I mean, just in case the executives started knocking on your door.

DA: The door was locked. Look, yeah, you hope no one gets a busted nose like a week out from shooting, so you say, "Watch the head shots." But guys get aggressive. You get the ego going. You try to monitor, but it is what it is. Fortunately, no one got too fucked up. [Laughs]

DA: Yeah. It's like a dog that can't help but return to its vomit. It's tough. I want to make movies that are different. You hear again and again that audiences want to see movies that are different and critics say we make the same thing again and again in Hollywood, then you go and make something different and you get kicked in the gut for it. That's kind of amazing. I wanted this to be for the military. I mean, I could have a body in the trunk and get pulled over by a cop and they would probably help me bury it—that's how much love I get off End of Watch from the police. I want the same kind of feeling from the armed forces. But, yeah, I read the reviews. It's disconcerting. Sometimes you have to ask, "Jeez, is it personal?" My heart and soul is in this film. I couldn't have done more to make it more emotionally realistic and make the characters more in-depth and it's really experiential. I wanted people to feel that. I hope it talks with audiences. I can take any aspect in the film, any line, and take you back to World War II and the source material where I got it. So when I hear "Oh, the third act is this made-up thing," no, it's not. That stuff happened.

ESQ: You've built your career off the scripts you've written. But do you welcome input from the actors?

DA: Brad's line, "Ideals are peaceful, history is violent," was his adlib, and onset I was like, "Dude, what are you doing?" Then it made it into the film because it put a nice thematic capstone on the film, it helped articulate what the film was about. But for the most part, it was shot on book. Actors need to get... [Pause] I don't want to say that... [Pause] I'll say they are like kids, they need to play a little bit. And that's the nature of their job, they need to shake off some of that energy and then you as the director get them back on track. When you do loosen up the reins, you get some amazing things, but yeah, you have to wring out the performances for every last good drop.